Introduction

T2K - A Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment

One of the most outstanding problems yet to be fully understood is that of the properties of the neutrinos. Once believed to be massless particles, recent observations have proven that neutrinos do have mass. These observations have implications in several areas from cosmology to elementary particle physics. A direct consequence of assigning mass to neutrinos is that these particles can oscillate between different neutrino flavors (electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino). Our Department is part of the T2K international collaboration, a long baseline neutrino experiment in Japan aiming at measuring some of these oscillations with unprecedented accuracy and discovery the yet unknown theta13 parameter. Our current interests range from detector development to physics simulations and data analyzes. The T2K experiment was commissioned with beams of neutrinos in February 2010, and has since then collected a significant statistics that are current being analyzed.